Astronomers have charted the largest-ever volume of the universe with a new map of active supermassive black holes living at the centers of galaxies. Called quasars, the gas-gobbling black holes are, ironically, some of the universe's brightest objects. The new map logs the location of about 1.
The new map includes around 1.3 million quasars from across the visible universe and could help scientists better understand the properties of dark matterAstronomers have charted the largest-ever volume of the universe with a new map of active supermassive black holes living at the centers of galaxies. Called quasars, the gas-gobbling black holes are, ironically, some of the universe's brightest objects. The new map logs the location of about 1.
"This quasar catalog is different from all previous catalogs in that it gives us a three-dimensional map of the largest-ever volume of the universe," says map co-creator David Hogg, a senior research scientist at the Flatiron Institute's Center for Computational Astrophysics in New York City and a professor of physics and data science at New York University.
Quasars are powered by supermassive black holes at the centers of galaxies and can be hundreds of times as bright as an entire galaxy. As the black hole's gravitational pull spins up nearby gas, the process generates an extremely bright disk and sometimes jets of light that telescopes can observe. "It has been very exciting to see this catalog spurring so much new science," Storey-Fisher says."Researchers around the world are using the quasar map to measure everything from the initial density fluctuations that seeded the cosmic web to the distribution of cosmic voids to the motion of our solar system through the universe."
Kate Storey-Fisher, David W. Hogg, Hans-Walter Rix, Anna-Christina Eilers, Giulio Fabbian, Michael R. Blanton, David Alonso.Astrophysicists have developed a new method for pinpointing the whereabouts of extremely rare extragalactic objects. They hope their technique for finding 'changing-look quasars' will take scientists ...
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